An Open Office Spreadsheet

[shadowsknight]

Over the past several years my wife and I have been refining an Open Office spreadsheet to keep track of load pay, fuel, time on the road, and expenses. Everything has it's own tab. The tabs are at the bottom of the document. Lower left.

If you are not familiar with Open Office it is a free office suite like Microsoft office. You can read about it or download it here. OpenOffice.org - The Free and Open Productivity Suite
I will do not know if it will correctly convert into an MS Office Excel format. I'd rather use free software then paid.

As for my spreadsheet it is set up for me as an O/O that gets paid based on percentage of the load. (72%....you'll see it in the equations)
There is a summary page that my wife uses when she files taxes. Everything sorts by month and it is very easy to use. The expenses tab has drop downs that are sorted like the schedule C.
Don't ask me to make changes for you....I'm too busy...mostly tarping and strapping.

My favorite part is the fuel tab. In Column M Pd Total is what I actually paid when it shows up on my paycheck. This way I can track the difference between what the pump says and what I actually paid when it showed up on my paycheck. So far this year I have saved over $8000 dollars off of the pump price.

If you have any questions email me at shadowsknight@hotmail.com

The doc is hosted at google. https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B1B...ZlYmZkMGY2YmM5

Good luck in the new year.
Keith

[Windwalker]

I'm quite familiar with "OpenOffice.Org". It's software that comes standard with Linux. I've been using it for aboput aq year now, and I like it better than Nicrosoft. Something I wish I had back when I was driving.

[GMAN]

I believe you can download extentions that will allow you to use openoffice in microsoft office.

[Musicman]

Not a bad job at all, shadowsknight. It’s not something I will use, as I have my own set of spreadsheets I’ve developed over the years, but what you’ve created is quite functional and I’m sure many on here would be able to benefit from your hard work and willingness to share.

I downloaded and my Microsoft Excel 2010 opened the file by default. I saved as an xlsx file and it works fine. I don’t know if older versions of Excel will open the file, but if anybody wants a copy that is in an older version of Excel, PM me with an email address and I’ll send it to you.

[YerDaddy]

Never used tabs. I just use rows and columns. 1 row per day, 1 column per item, 1 page per month and a yearly total page.

It still sucks entering in all the numbers.

Bookkeeping is the worst part about running a biz.

[Musicman]

The one thing I’ve changed over the years is to NOT put all my eggs (or in this case, worksheets) in one basket (or workbook). If the file is corrupted, even with backups, it is just that much more work to get all your data back up and running again. I used to have everything in one workbook and even have fuel data from years past all in that one file. A couple years ago after a scary incident where we almost lost that all-in-one data file I decided to split up each tab into its own workbook and store the resulting files on a cloud based network drive for safe keeping. The upside to this is that my files are accessible from any computer with internet access, meaning that I can make entries in a file from my truck and my wife (my office girl) can immediately read or modify the data from our home office. I have my network drive set to save the last ten versions of each file, so if I ever have a corruption in a file, I can easily retrieve everything up to the last saved version.

[Windwalker]

For my current use of spreadsheets, I store the data and templates on two flash drives. One, the original, the other a duplicate. I've had hard drives die and lost everything. Now, it's a simple matter of replacing the hard drive, reloading the operating system, plug in the flash drive, and everything is right back. The duplicate flash drive is because if one of them goes bad, I have a back up, and it's a simple matter to copy everything onto a third so that i maintain a back up.

I've also lost family pictures that i can not replace because they were taken with a digital camera and I trusted them to a hard drive. At least, with my operating system, I don't have to worry about virus anymore. That used to be a source of consternation before too. Coming up with a "blue screen" meant reloading the operating system into a formatted drive and all data was lost again. (And my luck with CD-R has been... Memorable...) Flash drives seem to work far better for data storage. The only thing I actually use the computer for is processing the data.

[YerDaddy]

I always email my Income/Expense and Fuel mpg spreadsheets to myself at my Yahoo account when I enter anything new, besides backing them up on a USB stick and periodically on external drives.

[GMAN]

[QUOTE=YerDaddy;506977]I always email my Income/Expense and Fuel mpg spreadsheets to myself at my Yahoo account when I enter anything new, besides backing them up on a USB stick and periodically on external drives.[/QUOTE


That is a good idea to email them to yourself. I wish that I had done that a couple of years ago before my system crashed.